Using the online resources such as face book and other blogging websites where you can express your feeling towards opinions facing you is becoming more and more controversial every day. Whether or not the school authorities’ or officials can penalize you for saying or expressing your feeling about them in a blog is a different story.
I believe that everyone has a freedom to speech and as long as they express their feelings in the boundaries of that right then there is no right for them to be penalized, especially by the outside authorities’ such as school. The school has absolutely no right to look through a student’s face book or MySpace and suspend a student for blogging about his feeling of a teacher or any higher authority in the school. What they say is strictly their right of freedom of speech. The most important reason why I believe that the students should not have gotten in trouble for what they blogged about online is because they did this on an outside resource from school, so it was no where involved as being the schools business.
There defiantly is a limit to what speech can go on the internet, but what are the boundaries you may ask. Well freedom of speech is involving feelings expressed towards someone or something, you can call them names or say whatever you want about them, but where it gets controversial is the question. When you start to threaten people violently or verbally in your blogs, now that is where it becomes wrong and crosses the line. It also becomes wrong when you start telling people to harm a person or give away their address or giving away schedules of when the person is where or even when anyone from his family is where so that people can take this information and maybe hurt or assault them during certain times.
I do believe that schools have the right to limit what their students say inside of the school. If a student makes a blog post that’s controversial and ascertaining to the way one feels about a teacher or official on a computer in the school, then it’s the schools business and they then have the right to take action and penalize the student. It depends on also what is being said, I still believe that the school still has little or no right to really do anything about it though, because of the right for freedom of speech. Even if the speech about a teacher is not going online in a blog there will always be controversial talk between students, either in the halls, at lunch or even in class and the school cant do anything about it.
In conclusion, the school basically has absolutely no right to suspend or penalize the students for controversial talk that is being posted onto blogs from outside resources. No matter what the school officials do to stop this the controversial talk will go on, either on the internet or in person or peer groups, and the students will fight to protect their right to freedom of speech, even if it means going to court.